New York—The revolution in biomedical publishing is just a mouse click away.
With the recent creation of such online publishing initiatives as BioMed Central, PubMed Central, and CrossRef, researchers and clinicians have less costly and more immediate access to research articles. But this newfound freedom of access to biomedical information has raised critical questions for scientific publishers and their readers. Among them are whether research published online should be available at no cost and how that research should be peer-reviewed. Scientific and medical associations that currently publish paper-based journals also face important issues regarding shifting sources of revenue as free or low-cost electronic access competes with traditional subscription and distribution systems.
"It's easy to be frightened about what's happening through the Internet in many disciplines, and this could happen in science, too. We should not be naive about this," said Harold Varmus, MD, president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering . . . [Full Text of this Article]
